Sixteenth-century testaments of Cracow nobility

Abstract

The article explores the wills made by Cracow nobility in the 16th c. The source basis were documents for the court records of the voivodship of Cracow and the records of the royal chancellery (Metrica Regni Poloniae). Exploratory research was also conducted in municipal and church records. All these types of sources revealed 47 wills made by 41 people (excluding double entries concerning the same testament). Such a limited number indicates that in the 16th c. the nobility rarely wrote down their testaments. The oldest will, made by Piotr Gniady, the starost of Nidzica, was made on 6th June 1514. All the oldest testaments were in Latin; the first one written fully in Polish was from 1539. The testators were mostly representatives of the elite, magnates, officials and people connected with the royal court. Others were low-rank provincial nobles, some not affluent enough to possess a landed estate. Very few of the documents were testaments of members of well-known middle-rank noble families. Sixteenth-century wills differed in form and content from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ones. The formula was less complex, the document was shorter and included less in-formation on the testator. It usually only concerned the disposition of the property or the guardianship of the testator’s children. Testaments of sixteenth-century nobility are rare nowa-days (no more than 200–300 documents preserved from the whole of the Crown of Poland) and thus deserve further extensive research.